John Cowley, The Victorian Encounter with Marx.
Baxter, David
John Cowley, The Victorian Encounter with Marx (London: British
Academic Press, 1992), ix + 164 pp., $49.95 cloth.
The subject of this study is the life and work of Ernest Belford
Bax. Bax was a member of that pioneering band of men and women who did
so much to organize the British socialist movement in the latter half of
the nineteenth century. While many of these men and women (for example,
William Morris and Beatrice Webb) have been subject to extensive
critical evaluation, Bax's political and intellectual contributions
to the movement have been virtually ignored. John Cowley sets out to
rectify this situation by presenting a portrait of a man who, when he
died in 1926 at the age of 72, was hailed as the "father of British
socialism."
Bax's political radicalism first emerged in the aftermath of
the Paris Commune. The courage and heroism of the Parisian workers
(along with the violence and brutality they subsequently suffered) had a
profound impact. As yet, Bax did not formally recognize himself as a
socialist. Soon, however, meetings with ex-Communards, along with the
influence of the 'Positivist Society' (a club he frequented
that propagated the humanitarian ideas of Auguste Comte), motivated the
adoption of a radical perspective. These early influences did much to
shape Bax's subsequent views that were deeply informed by a
fidelity to the ethical ideals of human solidarity and commonality of
purpose.
If Bax's socialism had been founded solely on an ethical
impulse, it would have contained little to distinguish it from that of
his other colleagues. But Bax was unique: Virtually alone amongst the
ranks of British socialists, he had studied philosophy.
In 1875 and then again in 1880, Bax made extended trips to Germany
where he read and absorbed Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Marx. On his
return, he wrote a number of articles popularizing the theory in Dos
Kapital (one of which was highly praised by Marx himself). It was not
until 1883, however, that Bax began to make a significant philosophical
contribution in his own right. In a series of books, many of which
enjoyed wide public acclaim, he set out to explore the nature of
consciousness, particularly as conceived by Schopenhauer.
Bax focused on what the latter had designated the "alogical will," that is, the 'I' that feels and has a potential
for consciousness. This 'I' is not an element of pure thought
(of the kind favored by neo-Kantian idealism). Rather, it forms the
dynamic center permitting each individual to reconstruct and produce a
world of experience. In these terms, objective reality itself becomes a
determination of consciousness, and truth is measured not in terms of
its correspondence to the external world, but rather in terms of the
self-consistency of consciousness.
Bax then turned to apply this principle to the question of social
change. It was widely accepted that Marx's theoretical project had
intentionally inverted Hegel's idealist world view in order to
award conceptual preeminence to real, material conditions. Bax's
understanding of the alogical will, however, was not conducive to the
priority of economic inquiry. Rather, in a stunning reversal of
intellectual orthodoxy, he argued that philosophy must (re)absorb the
scientific analysis informing societal transformation into a grand
(Hegelian) vision of the development of consciousness. For Bax, in
short, social and historical change was to be comprehended in terms of
the evolution of the ethical sentiment of solidarity that is manifested
in the alogical impulse informing all human endeavors.
The development of a proletarian consciousness has always been
recognized as crucial for the success of the socialist project. It is
surprising then to consider how little time or imagination radical
theoreticians of this era devoted to its analysis. Marx, for example,
suggested that revolutionary consciousness would emerge from the
progressively more acute contradiction between capitalism's forces
and relations of production. Yet if consciousness is simply viewed as
the crude, "automatic" outcome of an objective social
contradiction, then there seems to be no place for politically active
human participation in the struggle for socialism. It is to Bax's
credit that in the face of the vulgar materialism of the Second
International he attempted to develop a theory that emphasized the con-
stituting role of human initiative and personal commitment to the
development of an active moral consciousness.
Compared to his intellectual endeavors, Bax's political
activity was of less moment and it is not particularly clear from
Cowley's account why the paternity of the socialist movement should
have been attributed to him. Apart from one brief spell, Bax was
committed to the Social Democratic Federation (the leading socialist
organization of the day). He appears to have had little taste for public
speaking and preferred to work behind the scenes as an advisor to other
leading members of the Federation. Occasionally, however, he did become
involved in political issues. The most significant of these episodes was
his opposition to the suffragette movement in the years immediately
preceding the first world war.
Bax argued that because most suffragettes were avowed liberals,
granting them the franchise would only reinforce the reformist current
of British politics. The point, however, was to struggle for social
transformation and the instantiation of a new type of society in which a
broader range of rights and freedoms would be extended to all. Cowley
remarks in an aside (in a rather dismissive manner not untypical of his
personal comments in what is otherwise a well-researched study) that
such a position could not be seriously held by socialists. But why not?
As Bax recognized, the capitalist system possesses an immense capacity
to absorb a wide variety of reformist measures without calling its basic
social and economic presuppositions into question. In these
circumstances, the principal task of the socialist theoretician is to
recognize when and how these reforms will assist the higher goal of
social transformation.
It is only in recent years that British socialists have once again
turned to philosophy to find a theoretical underpinning for their
project. Sadly, Bax's work has found no place in this inquiry. In
today's world, where even the left has been seduced by the spurious
claims of postmodernism and deconstruction, Bax's celebration of
the constituting, ethical will is viewed as little more than an
historical curiosity.
David Baxter
Wilfrid Laurier University
